Tone Match
How Epilude adapts your dictated text to fit the app you're typing in, with a separate tone for messages, email, and everything else.
Tone Match lets you control how Epilude formats your text based on where you're typing. The same dictation can come out polished and punctuated in an email, but lowercase and casual in a chat with a friend.
Tone Match works alongside Cleanup, which controls how much Epilude rewrites — together they decide both the tone and the depth of every edit.
How Tone Match works
Every time you dictate, Epilude looks at the app you're typing in and groups it into one of four categories. Each category has its own tone, which controls things like capitalization and punctuation. Change the tone for a category once, and every app in that category follows it.
The four categories
| Category | Example apps |
|---|---|
| Personal messages | iMessage, WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Messenger |
| Work messages | Slack, Teams, Discord, Zoom |
| Apple Mail, Outlook, Superhuman, Gmail (web), Spark | |
| Other | Notes, Notion, Word, Docs, code editors, anywhere else |
Epilude detects browser-based apps too. Dictating into Gmail in Chrome, for example, uses your Email tone, not your Other tone.
The four tones
| Tone | What it does |
|---|---|
| Formal | Sentence capitalization, full punctuation |
| Casual | Sentence capitalization, lighter punctuation |
| Very casual | All lowercase, minimal punctuation |
| Excited | Sentence capitalization, exclamation points where they fit |
Not every tone is offered in every category. Personal messages skip Excited; Work messages, Email, and Other skip Very casual. The defaults are Casual for messages and Formal for email and other writing.
Same words, different vibe
Tone Match only changes formatting. It never changes your word choice or rewrites what you said.
Setting your tones
Open the Tone Match section
Open Epilude and click Tone Match in the sidebar.
Pick a category
Use the tabs at the top to switch between Personal messages, Work messages, Email, and Other.
Pick a tone
Click the tone card you want for that category. The change applies to your next dictation, no restart needed.
You can also run through a guided setup the first time you open the section, which walks you through all four categories in order.
How Epilude picks the right tone
When you finish dictating, Epilude:
- Looks at the frontmost app on your Mac
- Matches it to one of the four categories
- Applies the tone you picked for that category
For browsers, Epilude reads the active window title to figure out which web app you're using. So Gmail, Outlook on the web, Slack in the browser, and the rest land in the same category as their native counterparts.
If an app doesn't match any of the messaging or email categories, it falls into Other.
Troubleshooting
- My app keeps using the wrong tone. Most likely it's landing in the Other category. That's currently the catch-all for any app that isn't a known messaging or email client. Set your Other tone to whatever you want for general writing.
- I changed the tone but my next dictation looks the same. Tone Match only applies when Cleanup is set to Light, Medium, or High. At None, Epilude inserts your raw transcript and ignores the tone.
- Can I set a different tone for one specific app? Not today. Tone Match works at the category level, not per app.
Related
- Cleanup — Choose how much Epilude rewrites your dictations
- Smart Formatting — Local, rule-based formatting with voice cues